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How to delete ghost emails in inbox and unread

Since buying and downloading content by iCloud to a new iPhone 6S from an iPad (both are running iOS 11.6.2) the generic Mail app in only the iPhone shows 92 mails in the Home Page icon red dot, but the Inbox and Unread are empty. The previous iPhone 5C did not show this.


When downloading content, the Mail app downloaded over 350 mails, the majority were deleted from the previous iPhone 5C a very long time ago. I settled down to delete the unwanted content of the Inbox, but at 92 shown remaining I ran out of mails to delete from the Inbox.


There are numerous entries in a Google search for this, but none of the fixes that allege to clear this problem work.


How do I clear the remaining unwanted emails and restore the Home page Mail icon to the correct number?

iPhone 6s, iOS 11.2.6

Posted on Feb 23, 2018 1:29 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 23, 2018 9:11 AM

Well, if anybody was following this thread, whilst tinkering with the Mail app, I fixed this myself. Of course, like most tech faults and problems it was ridiculously easy.


In the Unread box in Mail, pressed Edit, then Mark All, from the option list Mark As Read. The 92 Ghost Unread mails disappeared and everything returned to normal with zero (no red dot) in the Home page icon. Quite why the 92 unread mails did not appear in either the Inbox or Unread boxes remains unexplained. If anybody knows I would be happy to find out.


This also fixed another problem I was having; that I was having trouble connecting to my email carrier when away from my home WiFi, where the Inbox message at the bottom of the screen reported "Connecting (92 unread)". This was also fixed with the above edits. All now works normally.

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1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 23, 2018 9:11 AM in response to Petlew

Well, if anybody was following this thread, whilst tinkering with the Mail app, I fixed this myself. Of course, like most tech faults and problems it was ridiculously easy.


In the Unread box in Mail, pressed Edit, then Mark All, from the option list Mark As Read. The 92 Ghost Unread mails disappeared and everything returned to normal with zero (no red dot) in the Home page icon. Quite why the 92 unread mails did not appear in either the Inbox or Unread boxes remains unexplained. If anybody knows I would be happy to find out.


This also fixed another problem I was having; that I was having trouble connecting to my email carrier when away from my home WiFi, where the Inbox message at the bottom of the screen reported "Connecting (92 unread)". This was also fixed with the above edits. All now works normally.

How to delete ghost emails in inbox and unread

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